From Mompos our fears for a difficult and complicated journey to Santa Marta were unfounded. Copetran ran a connecting bus to El Banco from where we took a five hour direct bus to Santa Marta, Colombia’s oldest port on the Caribbean, from where the original Spanish conquistadors started their conquest. We chose to base ourself in the small backpacker resort of Taganga, which sits in the next bay up from Santa Marta and is effectively a suburb of the city today.
Taganga is set up to support the tourism industry, with many hostels, bars, restaurants and travel agencies and has a noisy and young vibe. Not only does Taganga act as a gateway to Tayrona National Park, it also is the starting place for the five day trek to Cuidad Perdita. Our hostel was right on the beach as part of a row of bars and restaurants who’s only entrance was from the beach, the road stopped a block away.
The beach at Taganga has coarse sand but the setting between two headlands and the blue Caribbean sea makes for a fairly attractive location. The resort itself is popular with both backpackers and Colombian visitors and is pretty lively. The beach also supports a large number of quite docile dogs, that scrape a living from titbits from visitors and at night sleep on the beach.
On our first full day there, we took a boat to Playa Cristal, which sits in the centre of Tayrona National Park. The boats leave from the beach at Taganga and take about an hour and a half to Playa Cristal. The journey battles against the strong currents and the sea continually drenches the boat as it rides through the waves so by the time the boat reached Playa Cristal everyone and everything was totally drenched in sea water.
Playa Cristal is one of those picture post card perfect tropical beaches, with the jungle and palm trees coming down from the mountains to the sandy beach. The beach itself can only be reached by boat so it is largely unspoilt, but gets pretty crowded with day-trippers. The sea is a deep blue and the waves make for pleasant swimming, though the water gets deep pretty quickly. The journey back to Taganga, works with the currents, so while the boat surfs up and down the waves, it is not battling against the elements so it takes almost half the time to return and has nowhere near the same amount of spray so everyone stays a lot drier.
On the second day we went further into the National Park and entered the Park at the main entrance at El Zaino. The entrance fee at COP 64,000 a head is quite steep, but the Park and its walkways are very well maintained. From there we took the 6 km walk through the jungle and across a number of beaches to El Cabo San Juan de Guía from where we took a connecting boat back to Taganga. The many beaches along the way were pristine tropical beaches, some of which you could also swim in, while others had really strong rip tides and are positively dangerous to swim in. The jungle paths are well maintained and in many places have raised wooden walkways to protect the land. There are numerous birds in the jungle as well as capuchin monkeys. We even saw a crocodile soaking up the sun on one of the lagoons behind Arrecifes Beach.
Tayrona National Park is undoubtedly is one of the star destinations in Colombia and certainly with the unspoilt jungle meeting the clean beaches is a tropical paradise.
Date: 12/12/2018 to 15/12/2018